Apollo Stacy

�Anal Capitalism”

 

In “Anal Capitalism,” Silverman and Farocki seem to stress, amongst other things, that Weekend can be viewed through a very capitalist lens.  Their modus operandi is to address, in order, each of the film’s well-defined episodes and to analyze the social commentary contained within each.  Although the article hopelessly meanders, mains lines of argument do seem to surface: in the unrestricted market of a capitalist society, everything loses absolute value and becomes subordinate to the “general equivalent.”  “Everything” includes gender, the individual, classes, time, race, history, etc.

 

Much of Silverman and Farocki’s thesis on “anal capitalism” is encapsulated by Weekend’s “seduction” scene.  The seduction scene is where Corrine (very graphically) recounts a sexual fantasy, involving herself and a married couple, to her lover.  In the seduction scene, the gender divide is broken, and man and woman become interchangeable commodities.  This is achieved by decentering the phallus---one of gender’s defining terms---and centering the anus.  Decentering the phallus subordinates man’s usually elevated status over woman, and centering the anus, since it is not specific to either gender, equalizes man and woman.  In the seduction scene, the phallus becomes interchangeable with eggs and milk, and man becomes interchangeable with woman and woman with man.  Through their interchangeability, man and woman lose their absolute values, or become commodified.  Anality, which effects this commodification, thus becomes a signifier of equivalence.  Anality is also a signifier of excrement.  If a commodity only has value before it is enjoyed, enjoying it consumes its value and reduces it to waste or shit.  Thus, anality, Silverman and Farocki argue, is closer to the “truth” of capitalism than the phallus which only subordinate, does not equalize.

 

S&F also argue that the individual is commodified in Weekend’s traffic jam scene.  In the traffic jam scene, an extended tracking shot reveals drivers assert their individuality through the cars they drive, “what they have in their vehicles, how they are dressed, [and] how they spend their time.”  However, all of these drivers were traveling on the same French highway and are now trapped in the same traffic jam.  Although they attempt to differentiate amongst themselves, they are commodified by their inescapable circumstances.

 

Classes are commodified in the scene where a rich, Parisian girl’s sports car is wrecked by a poor, farmer‘s tractor.  The girl, in the argument that ensues, appeals to witnesses to take sides, but these witnesses disregard her pleas.  This leaves the girl and the farmer feeling shorn of value.  As a source of comfort, the girl and the farmer put their arms around each other.  The separate classes that the girl and the farmer represent are further brought together when they ally against Roland and Corrine, calling them “filthy, rotten stinking Jews.”  Thus, in capitalism, even society’s classes are equalized.

 

Even abstractions such as time, S&F argue, are commodified too in capitalism.  When Roland takes shortcuts, Corrine accuses him of wasting their time.  Since they are in a race against time to see Corrine’s father before he dies, time, Corrine says, “means money.”  Moreover, the film persistently divides “weeks into days and days into hours,” giving notice through its intertitles.  Through their sheer number, these divisions become indistinguishable from each other.  Thus, even temporality is commodified in capitalism.

 

Race and history are commodified in the polemics the black and Algerian actors deliver straight to the camera.  The black actor calls for the violent uprising of blacks against whites, insisting on the “binarism” that exists between the races.  However, his rhetorical strategies, S&F argue, draw parallels between blacks and whites (“I maintain that a black man’s freedom is as valuable as that of a white man.”) and in so doing essentially equalizes, or commodifies, the two races.

 

The Algerian actor argues that the early development of Western culture is reflected in the primitive cultures of the Incans, Mayans, and Aztecs.  Supposedly, Western culture has moved away from this primitivism.  However, when the Algerian actor mentions the Indian tribes, the film cuts to future scenes of the cannibalistic hippies who are presumably representative of Western culture.  The film insists the primitivism of the Indian tribes has persisted through the past to the present in the form of the hippies.  Thus, Western culture, its past and present stages, is also commodified.